Popular online social
news and entertainment site Reddit as social economy game/ parallel to game
culture
Reddit.com is a site
where users submit content in the form of a link or a text (self) post, and
then other users show their appreciation
of displeasure with the post by voting the submission either up or down.
Submissions that have a high ratio of upward votes (Upvotes) to downward votes
(Downvotes) gain more visibility. The site is comprised of divided communities
or "subreddits", and as a registered user of the site you are given
the ability to create your own community with a focus on anything you like,
politics, movies, games, music etc.
On each registered
user account there is a counter that records the number of upvotes that the
account has garnered over the course of its posting history. This number, known
as Karma, essentially acts as an indication of how successful the poster is at submitting
interesting or thought-provoking content. This is the sole function of Karma.
You cannot redeem these points for anything, they have no monetary value
whatsoever and yet there are people who dedicate hefty amounts of their time to
collecting these points in the most efficient way possible.
In this way reddit can be seen as an economy (or
hoarding) simulator of sorts, the
purpose of which is to gain capital or - the approval of the users present on
the site. In this economy there are producers, users who generate or find
content, and two kinds of consumers: passive consumers, who either are not
registered or do upvote or downvote, and active consumers, registered users who
contribute to the game economy by voting their opinions on the content
presented. Within this system, it's not illogical to assume that new and
interesting content will be rated more highly and that boring or reused content
will be rated poorly and thus lose visibility.
However, this is
largely not the case and reposts (knock-offs) of popular posts are rife, some
being unintentional and some not, but many receiving near or as many positive
votes as the original. Often posts with a new point of view are rejected
while (very)slightly different
iterations of the same old viewpoint are rewarded.
Why is this?
58% of reddit users
are below 35 and over 60% are male, and to this end, the main content producers
of reddit tailor their posts to this demographic. For presenting or agreeing
with generally held beliefs of the relevant subreddit, users are accepted and thus
more likely to gain positive feedback and incentive to post more. Successful
posts are popular posts, so the cycle repeats itself ad nauseam until the core
beliefs of the majority demographic are ingrained into the economics of the
game. Much like the gaming community at
large, within reddit change is often seen as a threat to many and thus is
stamped out.
The stagnation brought
about by these attitudes mirrors that which we see in the gaming industry, as
do many of the prevailing attitudes regarding sexuality, race and gender. The
answer to this on reddit is to have moderators, who manage their own
communities. Some are well managed (new content, fresh ideas, adherence to
rules - /r/askscience) and some are poorly managed (little respect for forum
rules or guidelines with little intervention of the moderators in the way of
enforcing). These are in isolated communities however and a global solution is
yet to be found. What is the solution for games? A regulatory body or
screening process? Inspectors?
As an economical model reddit is a microcosm of
gaming society (as well as a part of it) as it showcases the cycle of content
and belief reinforcement that we see as
gamers, in the form of a game where the aim is to manipulate and utilise
popular opinion for profit.
